China hitting India via Net worm?

The deadly Stuxnet internet worm, which was thought to be targeting Iran's nuclear programme, might actually have been aimed at India by none other than China.

Providing a fresh twist in the tale, well-known American cyber warfare expert Jeffrey Carr, who specialises in investigations of cyber attacks against government, told TOI that China, more than any other country, was likely to have written the worm which has terrorised the world since June.

While Chinese hackers are known to target Indian government websites, the scale and sophistication of Stuxnet suggests that only a government no less than that of countries like US, Israel or China could have done it. "I think it's more likely that China is behind Stuxnet than any other country," Carr told TOI, adding that he would provide more details at the upcoming NASSCOM DSCI Security Conclave in Chennai in December.

Attributing the partial failure of ISRO's INSAT 4B satellite a few months ago -- the exact reason for which is not yet known -- to Stuxnet, Carr said it was China which gained from the satellite failure.

Carr, however, made it clear that he had not arrived at any definite conclusion till now. He said he was pointing out that there were alternative targets in countries other than Iran that also made sense and served another nation's interest to attack -- namely India's Space Research Organisation which uses the exact Siemens software targeted by Stuxnet.

"Further, the satellite in question (INSAT 4B) suffered the power `glitch' in an unexplained fashion, and it's failure served another state's advantage -- in this case China," he said.

Alongwith Indonesia and Iran, India has had the maximum number of infections from Stuxnet which affects Windows computers and gets transmitted through USB sticks. While Iran and Indonesia had about 60,000 and 13,000 Stuxnet infections respectively till late September, India was at the third position with over 6,000 infections. However, it infects only those computers which use certain Siemens software systems. Siemens software systems are used in many Indian government agencies including ISRO.

As it had impacted Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran, it was thought that Iran might have been the intended target. Israel, in fact, had emerged as the prime suspect.

According to Carr, the Siemens software in use in ISRO's Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre is S7-400 PLC and SIMATIC WinCC, both of which, he said, would activate the Stuxnet worm. The Stuxnet worm was first discovered in June this year, a month before INSAT 4B was hit by the mysterious power failure.
Courtesy:The Times Of India.

Soon, cell phones to be powered by conversations!

The more you talk, the longer your cell phone battery will last - that's the future scientists have predicted with a new technology that converts sound to electricity.Scientists from Korea have turned the main ingredient of calamine lotion into a tiny material that converts sound waves into electricity, reports Discovery News.The research could lead to panels that can charge a cell phone from a conversation or provide a boost of energy to the nation's electrical grid generated by the noise during rush hour traffic.Using zinc oxide, the main ingredient in calamine lotion, Young Jun Park, Sang-Woo Kim and their colleagues created a field of nanowires sandwiched between two electrodes.The researchers blasted that sandwich with sound waves, which at 100 decibels were not quite as loud as a rock concert. A normal conversation is about 60-70 decibels.The sound waves produced a mild electrical current of about 50 millivolts. The average cell phone requires a few volts to operate, several times the power this technology can currently produce."Just as speakers transform electric signals into sound, the opposite process-of turning sound into a source of electrical power -- is possible," Discovery News quoted Young Jun Park and Sang-Woo Kim, the two corresponding authors of the new article, as saying."Sound power can be used for various novel applications including mobile phones that can be charged during conversations and sound-insulating walls near highways that generate electricity from the sound of passing vehicles," the co-authors added.The study has been published in the journal Advanced Materials.

Courtesy:ANI.

Touchscreen phone with 3D user interface

With touchscreens commanding more and more attention from young and old alike, manufacturers have started bringing out touchscreen phones on a budget. After Samsung launched its "Champ" touchscreen phone at the under Rs 5,000 price, more manufacturers have joined in and started launching budget touchscreen phones. Micromax has launched its dual-SIM X550 Cube touchscreen device with a range of features that are not available to consumers at its price.

The X550 cube looks very urban and would attract young students who are looking at a budget touchscreen device. The phone has a smooth matte finish across the body with a 3.2" resistive touchscreen dominating the front. There is a single button (in shiny purple) on the front under the display that functions as the back button and on the right side are the volume keys and camera shutter key. At the base is a microUSB port and a 3.5 mm audio port. The power/hold button is at the top, and its a bit too small and poorly nested in the body for comfortable use.

Coming to the user-interface, the home-screen has animated wallpapers that are touch sensitive almost like the ones found on Android devices. There is a quick application launcher at the bottom, but it has a few select applications to choose from. At the bottom itself is a menu icon and a back icon for easy navigation. The main menu area is the actual cube interface by which the phone's name has been inspired.

A single touch on the icon and the 4 menu pages show up in a cube format which can be rotated easily to quickly move through menu pages. The main menu can also be navigated by pressing on the display and moving the finger left or right. This way it the navigation occurs in a 3D wall motion. The interesting part is that the UI on the whole is very zippy and quick to respond. The only issue we had was with the lock screen as it requires the user to move the lock slider upto 75% of the display to unlock the screen which is a pain.

Typing an SMS is another major issue we faced. The onscreen QWERTY keyboard is one of the things that cripples the value of the phone. First of all the onscreen keys are too small to comfortably use with fingers and secondly, instead of the standard 3 row QWERTY keyboard, the phone divides the keyboard in 4 rows, thus making it extremely difficult to use.

Even for a new user, it would take some time to get used to the keyboard. The handwriting recognition worked fine, but then it affects the input speed as it recognised one character at a time and not whole words.

In terms of multimedia features, the X550 Cube has FM Radio with recording and the phone was able to catch all radio stations in auto search with good clarity. The recording worked great as well and provided options to record audio in high quality .wav format.

The MP3 player worked great as well, though it did take a few minutes to get all songs on the memory card in first scan. The X550 comes with a basic 2 MP camera and lacks any flash. The camera does provide various settings such as banding, effects, white balance, night mode etc.

The volume output from external and in-ear speakers from the phone is extremely loud and clear, though at maximum volume the loudspeaker started blaring. The phone also has Bluetooth with A2DP and comes loaded with applications such as Opera, Nimbuzz and Snaptu.

Overall, the Micromax X550 Cube is a great entry-level touchscreen phone. However, its quirks in respect to the onscreenkeypad, poor camera and the lock screen makes it loose out in terms of ease of usage and features.

At its price of Rs 5,999, the phone faces stiff competition from the Fly E145 which sports a similar 3.2" display, 2MP camera, handwriting recognition alongwith dual SIM capabilities with a motion sensor added in the mix and comes at Rs 5,499.

Courtesy:CyberMedia

Facebook's new way to sort friends, copy

After the initial basic interactive rush, wherein Facebook provided the social networking tool, the company is now looking to make itself more user-friendly.Facebook is introducing tools that will make it easier for people to separate their online friendships into different groups and copy all the personal information they have posted on the website.The new features will start rolling out to Facebook's more than 500 million worldwide users today.Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the changes during a press conference that marked his first public appearance since last Friday's debut of "The Social Network," a movie tracing Facebook's origins and evolution.The movie depicts Zuckerberg as an isolated, treacherous genius. Zuckerberg told reporters he wouldn't discuss the critically acclaimed film, which has drawn large audiences so far.He has previously scoffed at the movie as a gross exaggeration of his 6-year-old company's history.

Courtesy:yahoo.

Six Technologies To Cure Bad Driving

Enlarge Photo Six Technologies To Cure Bad Driving

Maureen Farrell, Forbes.com

The roads are alive with the sound of honking horns and crunching metal.

While the number of traffic fatalities in the U.S. has dropped to about 34,000 annually (the lowest level since 1954), pushing that number lower will only get tougher: Nearly 8 out of 10 seniors aged 70 years and up--the most crash-prone demographic--have drivers' licenses, more than ever before, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

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That's why car makers, parts suppliers and startup companies are betting on a host of new technologies--from simulation software to boost drivers' reaction speeds to night-piercing cameras to anti-slumber seats--to make the roads safer (and to put more vehicles on them). The U.S. government, too, is stepping on the gas with IntelliDrive, a five-year, $500 million research program focused on using mobile technology to make cars communicate with and react to their surroundings.

The ultimate vision, says Roderick MacKenzie, chief technical officer at ITS America, an intelligent-transportation-systems trade group in Washington, D.C.: "These are small steps toward an eventual goal of having fully autonomous vehicles that essentially drive themselves."

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Even the most optimistic futurists say autonomous vehicles are 20 years away, but brakes that take over in an emergency and cars that can talk to each other are on deck in the next five years. "The newest trend is [software] that predicts what's going to happen and what the driver will do," says Thilo Koslowski, vice president of automotive and vehicle research at Gartner.

Herewith, a sample of some of the newest technology coming down the pike.

Advanced Warnings Mobileye has created a camera-based warning system that alerts drivers if a collision is imminent. Dashboard-mounted, monitor-and-beep hardware that takes the guesswork out of parallel parking has been in cars for some time. Up ahead: Mobileye Chief Executive Skip Kinford says his next-generation systems will automatically take over a car's brakes in an emergency. For now, camera-sensor retrofits go for $800 per car.

Skill Tests Are you a good driver? GreenRoads thinks it can tell you. Using a barrage of sensors wired to your car, its software monitors habits like changing lanes without signaling and stopping suddenly at traffic lights. The company delivers updates over the Web. For now, GreenRoads sells its services to automobile fleet companies. (It won't disclose pricing.) Down the road, Chief Executive Dan Steere aims to sell monthly subscriptions to individual drivers.

Brain Games Posit Science aims to sharpen the minds of older drivers. Using brain fitness research from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the company's DriveSharp videogame software increases an older person's ability to process what comes into her "useful field of view," or the 180-degree area in a driver's sightline. National Institute of Health research estimated that DriveSharp reduces accident risk in older adults by 50%. Insurers All-State and The Hartford will write $50 and $25 checks, respectively, to seniors who spend 10 hours using the software, which costs $89.

Night Vision Flir Systems, maker of infrared cameras, has teamed up Autoliv, an autoparts company, to give drivers the same kind of night vision as troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Flir's cameras use thermal sensors to capture images five times further away than those able to be seen with bright headlights and flash them on a screen in a car's dashboard. BMW, Audi and Rolls Royce offer the systems as an option for about $2,200, but Flir Chief Executive Andy Teich hopes to get the price down below $800 in the next few years. (For more, check out Flir Systems Sees Growth In The Dark.)

Unsnarled Roads Traffic drained $87 billion from the U.S. economy in 2009, causing drivers to waste 4.2 billion hours per year, according to the Texas Transportation Institute. Worse, moving at a snail's pace encourages people to send text messages, making the roads even more treacherous. INRIX aims to eliminate the "I got stuck in traffic" excuse. The company takes real-time traffic information from the vehicles of partner companies like UPS and Ford to generate predictive traffic patterns. Motorists looking to know how it will take to get to a destination via different routes can pay $10 per year for a mobile phone application (running on the iPhone, and soon on Google's Android). INRIX plans to ink deals with more car companies to get their systems in cars by 2013.

Anti-Slumber Seats Much like ridges in the road before a toll both, engineers are looking for ways to shake drivers awake when they start to drift off. Teams at Daimler, Berlin's Fraunhofer Institute and George Washington University are testing new anti-slumber devices that do just that--say, by using sensors that measure pupil sizes and heart rate to trigger a series of warning beeps. Gartner's Koslowski says to expect these systems in the next three to five years.

3DS hits games giant Nintendo

Nintendo's struggle to bring its hotly anticipated 3D-capable player to the market has sparked concerns over the outlook for the company, with sales of its existing products sliding in key U.S. and European markets.

Nintendo shares fell more than 9 percent on Thursday after the video game maker slashed its profit forecast for the year and said its new 3D-capable handheld player would miss the crucial year-end shopping season.

We had been expecting a November launch for Japan, so the news was a disappointment, said Singapore-based analyst Atul Goyal of CLSA. With a delayed product launch, the stock should be in a twilight zone, where it may not do much for the next five-to-six months.

Many analysts had factored in a 2011 launch for the United States, but were taken aback by the late Japan sales date, set for late February.

Nintendo blamed the strong yen and lack of hit software for its existing handheld DS and Wii home game consoles, as well as the late launch of the new product, for a downward revision to its profit forecasts.

The new Nintendo 3DS, boasting a display that can be used without special glasses, set gamers abuzz at the E3 gameshow earlier in the year and was seen as key to reviving the company's sagging sales.

Nintendo shares were down 9.3 percent at 20,870 yen at 0503 GMT, heading for their biggest one-day drop in nearly 20 months. Volume spiked to 2.7 million shares, already 4 times the daily average over the past three months.

The stock fell as low as 20,770 yen, a level last seen in Dec. 2009.

The launch delay will put the pre-holiday spotlight on rivals Sony Corp and Microsoft Corp, whose new motion-controlled gaming accessories will be in stores in time for the peak shopping season in all major markets.

Based on Thomson Reuters StarMine's Analysts Revision Model, a measure of change in analyst sentiment, Nintendo ranks in the bottom percentile, placing it below Sony and Microsoft.

RED FLAGS

Nintendo will not launch the new version of its DS until Feb. 26 in Japan and March in the United States, by far the biggest market for the game machine maker.

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata blamed the delay on inability to meet anticipated demand within the year.

They are struggling with product transitions, said Jay Defibaugh, a game sector analyst at MF Global in Tokyo.

Those are struggles that will be ongoing for the next couple years for their Wii and 3DS, and I think that raises red flags among investors for the company's fundamentals over the medium term.

At 25,000 yen ($299), the new model is also priced substantially higher than existing DS models, raising some doubts about likely sales volumes.

Nintendo's Thursday stock tumble was an extension of a 3.7-percent fall on Wednesday in a late-day sell-off triggered by the announcement of the product delay in the last few minutes of trade. Shares in Mitsumi Electric, a maker of parts for Nintendo games, also fell 6.1 percent to 1,295 yen on Thursday. ($1=83.71 Yen)

Motorola launches dual sim handsets

Mobile phone manufacturer Motorola on Thursday said it has launched two dual sim handsets in the price range of Rs 5,000 to Rs 6,000.The Motorola EX115 is a new, dual-SIM QWERTY keypad phone and the Motorola EX128 is a stylish touch screen dual-SIM phone, the company said in a statement.The Motorola EX128 is priced at Rs 5,990 (MRP Rs 6,990) and the Motorola EX115 is available at Rs 4,990 (MRP Rs 5,990), the company said."One of our key focus segments is the dual-SIM market, a rapidly evolving market in India," Motorola Mobility Country Head of India Faisal Siddiqui said.According to the research firm IDC, multi-SIM capability, which is a common feature offered by the Indian handset makers, constituted nearly 39 per cent of the sales in the June quarter, up significantly from just one per cent in the corresponding quarter the previous year.It also stated that the Indian mobile market saw a unique trend of multi-SIM phones capturing 38.5 per cent of the market. This could be attributed to several new service providers responding with highly competitive tariff plans to a price sensitive mobile telephony user market.According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), telecom operators added 17 million subscribers in July this year and have been adding similar numbers over the last several months.